Middle east grocery stores near me

My 4 year anniversary was yesterday. I work a desk job, so I had the day off and so did he. The perfect opportunity to do something cute, right? Didn’t have to be expensive.. a picnic or something would’ve been amazing. I usually go all out but this year I didn’t plan anything, didn’t get anything, just waited to see what he was going to do because honestly I’m tired.
While I was in the bathroom, he stepped out and came back with the following: Chocolate pretzels (I hate pretzels and have made this clear a million times), a 6 pack of BEER….,half dead flowers that I see when I walk into the local grocery store every day, and a protein cookie that he ended up eating.
Then we had a normal day, watched tv, went to the gym, etc. I make a suggestion of maybe going out to eat cause I’m not in the mood to cook. He said maybe we could just get McDonald’s.. I say “k fine”. When it’s time to pay at McDonald’s, he asks for my card and I tell him I didn’t bring it (I didn’t think I was going to need it). He gets angry and says “wow ok”, pays for the food. then says I should’ve paid for it since I didn’t get him a gift, and that I left my card at home on purpose.
Ladies… what would you do? Am I being unappreciative? Maybe I’m biased cause other boyfriends from the past would at least take me out to a nice dinner? There are other problems in the relationship such as trust issues, emotional fights, etc. Should I just give up and accept that maybe loving someone isn’t a good enough reason to stay?
TLDR: partner got me a basic, low-effort gift for our 4 year anniversary and then got angry when I didn’t pay for our McDonald’s dinner.

(owing to the reddit character limit, I'm posting this in two parts, but it's one contiguous story)
There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.

First is my 33yo sister, she is separated from her husband and needs help with her kids but doesn’t wanna meet halfway. My parents and I live an hour away and despite us having friends and family nearby my sister refuses to move closer despite also having lupus. She also lives outside her means, she buys way too many toys for her kids but will turn around and ask me for money. She also expects me to come over and help on Saturdays but I work two jobs, trying to write a novel and I volunteer a lot. She even guilts me into watching the kids by sending me videos of them asking for me. She’s inconsiderate to say the least and I feel bad bc I wanna help but she won’t help herself.
My father isn’t really part of my life, we live together but don’t talk, he wasn’t even really a father to my older sister and brother on his side. When I was younger he was a manager at a grocery store near our house and bc we have the same name, my classmates would ask if he’s my dad and he would tell them yes but not before telling them I’m dumb and lazy and that’s all I’d heard at school. My dad has smoked longer than I’ve been alive and is the reason my mom and I have asthma. He is a paranoid man w/ anger problems. He has smashed phones and doors and smoked in the house all to agitate me. He was in an accident 10 years ago that ruptured the disks in his back so he isn’t very active but still has time to cause trouble. And even tho he is an a-hole my mother causes some of it. When my sister from my dads side came to visit when I was 11, my mother took me to a gas station and we sat there for hours until my sister left. Whenever my parents have talks mom brings up very unnecessary and irrelevant information. She plays the victim a lot and I hate it, and loves to guilt me into helping her with stuff or feeling sorry for her.
Also both parents and most of my family are homophobic and both have called me an abomination and a bundle of sticks and I am bisexual. Uncle has even said he would shoot somebody in his family if they were gay. I want to move out but bc of my family I don’t trust people. Other people in my life often flake on plans and can’t communicate. Only friends I have good relationships with live in other states. I’m scared to get a place by myself bc I’m bipolar and although I’ve came a long way I’m scared I’ll get into a bad depression and 💀 myself. I need to start therapy again but I feel like I’m too far gone.

Let me start off by saying I have always been extremely reclusive and the past nearly five years have been nothing short of me going to great lengths to avoid people at all costs outside of work (which had been mostly remotely since the pandemic) and going to the grocery store. I only recently managed to start to be able to go to the gym again to try to gain some strength back to help with my uneasiness after I was r**** around 4 years ago. It was so bad that I would pull up to the gym and see one guy there and then just leave, or try to wait in my car for them to leave first. When I lived in an apartment I even waited to take out my trash til the middle of the night so I didn’t have to see or interact with anyone. If I opened my door and someone was in the hallway, I’d go back inside until they were gone then leave. I generally will not exit my car if there are people around either. Finally at the gym, I slowly but surely got myself to start going in and have been fairly consistent. I used to never be scared of people I just never liked being around them. Adding that aspect really changed a lot of things for me. Recently I let some online friends all convince me to go to a massive music festival (500,000 attendees?) that I was in no way mentally (or otherwise) prepared for and I’m just at a loss on how to move forward from here. Leading up to the vacation I was in all sorts of bad shape medically going through various things with trying new medications for migraines and dealing with stomach ulcer issues, etc... high stress with my job and a particular friendship with one of the other people in the group who would be attending with us, things like that. I kept mentioning to everyone including that friend I was struggling with that I don’t think I should come. I tried to stress how hard this was going to be for me and I didn’t want to be a bother to anyone else but I don’t think they understood or tried to understand. To be honest, as bad as it feels, and I’m not sure, this could just be in my head, I feel like they didn’t care because we both had wanted to meet each other for a long time and had been past just being simply friends but weren’t dating so they may have just wanted to sleep with me. I don’t want to think that but I can’t be sure and although I brought it up later on in the trip they never clarified - more on that later. Anyway, any time I mentioned I shouldn’t come, I would either be treated like I was using this as a threat/to take something away from/be mean to my friend who I was having high tensions with OR met with reassurance that I’d be in a safe place with people who cared about me. Which made it very confusing and in the end I did go. A couple things to mention I have a lot of other trauma from my childhood and I do not function normally at all, I have C-PTSD, severe anxiety, and a lot of of other things that I think I will have to see a specialist for because really simple things tend to be hard for me. I ended up meeting with my long time friend I’d been having a rocky time with a day later than planned and after having missed a flight and being up 36+ hours the day before and working a 10-hour shift the day prior too. Everything was chaotic and I felt like the worlds biggest mess. I’ve never looked worse or felt more scatterbrained in my life. For the sake of the rest of this story I’ll call my friend: S. I’d known this person online since covid, so for about 3 years and we had been extremely close off and on. I have so much love for this person which is crazy because I usually do not care for people much or find it very hard. In the beginning of our friendship they were very caring and attentive but there were also drugs and alcohol involved and at the time I don’t think I realized a lot of the things they told me that meant a lot to me were probably when they were on drugs like molly. At the time I was pretty unfamiliar with that. I barely drank. Also probably worth mentioning S may have some issues of their own, behavioral or developmental and so they’re not “normal” like everyone else which is why I think we got along so well. We both could talk about the strangest things all day and have very particular interests and just really enjoyed spending time together prior to getting more heavily involved when arguments became more frequent. Back to the vacation: I was so nervous to be flying but finally got off my last plane and S was there to meet me near my baggage claim. I couldn’t believe I was finally meeting him. There were some definite differences I noticed in what I imagined or thought he would be like in person compared to what I’d seen from him online. He definitely had a cool, calm demeanor online but felt a bit more dorky in person which I actually loved. He was sweet and helped me with my bags and I nervously rambled about what I mess I was and how I’d already been having a difficult time. We talked about not doing anything sexual but sure enough at the hotel he was already making advances to get on my bed (we had two beds). I think my conversation and my obvious attentiveness to what he was doing kept him from actually moving to my bed without asking. Eventually he did ask to cuddle and we did have sex. Not really shocking considering I’ve always been extremely into him and vice versa. Between that day and the next we just got to enjoy each other’s company, sight-see, and got great food then eventually checked out of the hotel to meet up with everyone else in our group, get situated in our camping spot/the rv and get ready for the music festival. This is when it started going sour. I don’t think S was in any way prepared for how much comfort I needed around this amount of people. I come from a very rural area with towns that have around 1,200 occupants. The closest city has 70,000 and again I am not comfortable being around people regardless. Not sure if this trauma related or if I am on the spectrum with aspergers or autism but being around people gives me this extreme discomfort that I would liken to ripping my skin off. I don’t really know how to explain it. I’ve found that drugs and or alcohol can help or being around someone who makes me feel safe can help but it’s just so unsettling. So I try my best the first day, I’m quite stiff the whole time. We all had done some acid but I only did a half tab because I knew it could make things much worse, at best it might allow me to loosen up a bit. It didn’t. It made me nauseous. Uneasy. More needy. I convince S to go back with me to a place I know I can get some molly (not from strangers) so I am less tense and don’t have a meltdown. I know using drugs especially like molly is not a good answer for what I was going through but I felt like I was about to have some psychotic episode to be honest. I was so out of my element and S was having the time of his life - he absolutely LOVES music and I don’t think I could have a proper conversation with him to explain how I was feeling or get him to understand/care so I felt like it was my only option unfortunately. Anyway, it did help the night go a bit more smoothly. I let myself relax... a little. I had some fun. Not much which is sad because this was an extremely expensive festival to attend but I was having so much trouble getting out of my head. So many negative thoughts and weird emotions were rushing over me the entire time and I couldn’t get them to stop. The second night I was more prepared. Again, I did molly but nothing else. My friends had brought other things but I knew I had to be careful not to put myself in a position to have a bad trip or to make things worse. Molly is pretty straight forward and can more or less force a good time and me to relax to I kept with that instead. This was a common theme the duration of the 3-day festival. So the second day was the only day I could actually say I truly had fun. I enjoyed the music so much. Watching S have fun made my heart feel so full. He loves to dance and I took tons of videos of him enjoying himself. Other than me having to constantly get water and go to the restrooms it was pretty great. We were the last ones back to the rv and we messed around a bit since everyone was asleep and in a different part of the rv where they couldn’t heasee us. He fell asleep with me for a bit then went to get up and go to his bed but for some reason opened the rv door and left it wide open? It was so effing hot out and my bed was in the dining area where all the heat was coming in so I get upset... mostly because I can’t get the door to close. Idk why but we all had issues with this rv door the whole time we had it. Not sure if it was broken or what, half the stuff listed on the rv was broken so wouldn’t surprise me. So I just try to hold the door closed, super exhausted but perched near the stairs inside of the rv and after 5-9 minutes of S being gone he comes back and I kind of go off on him. I don’t know how bad, I don’t think I said anything hurtful just like, “Why would you leave it open? I’m tired but I had to sit here and hold the door closed because it’s so hot...” but my tone was rough and I could see a sad, disappointed look in his face. Like we just had so much fun and that’s the last thing he experienced before going to bed. The next day I was hoping would be the best day because I was hoping I’d get more relaxed around people but about 2 hours into the night we get stuck at these really great sets and S is up front literally fist bumping one of the DJs that he adores and completely euphoric. I stay back and take videos of him because I know people will be taking videos and I don’t want to be up there and have attention on me or be touching bodies with so many people. Just a really uncomfortable situation for me. Over an hour passes and I really have to pee, I don’t want to bother S and he hasn’t come over to check on me once so I test the waters by walking away to throw something in the trash. I think to myself that maybe I can find a bathroom. I go back to my original spot, see S and then think again that I really don’t want to bother him and it will make me uncomfortable to go up there and also to try to shout in his ear that I need to use the restroom. We had to wear earplugs this whole time and he really wasn’t listening to me or paying much attention to me at this point because he was so lost in the music. To be honest there’d been a few times he completely dismissed me trying to talk to him already during the festival so I weighed the options and felt like it wasn’t worth me being so uncomfortable just for him to most likely wave me off and not listen to me anyway. So I go to try to find the bathrooms on my own. 45 minutes later and I still haven’t found them. I don’t know how. There’s just so many people, I’m kind of short and my eyesight is shit and I just have no idea what I’m doing. I keep ending back by where S was so I go back to where I was standing originally and still see him. Finally I go up to him and just shout, “I’m leaving,” thinking he would follow far enough out of that tightly packed crown in front of the DJ that I could say more. He shouted back he wasn’t leaving. I think I went back and said it a second time then started walking away and waited 30-45 seconds to see if he followed. He didn’t. Probably didn’t help there was a mostly naked chick dancing right next to him up there either. At this point I can tell I’m the last thing on his mind. I think he actually scowled at me when I was trying to talk to him like I was definitely bothering him at this point. In the past he told me he likes to do things alone and he’s even told me I get in the way (you choose the context, you’re right either way) so I know he’d reached his limit with me. It sucks because he promised he’d be with me the whole time and convinced me to come when I didn’t want to based on telling me I’d be safe and yadda yadda but he literally wouldn’t even give me the time of day if I asked. Doesn’t hurt to mention throughout this whole festival ($700+ tickets btw) that I never got to see anyone I wanted to see. It was just him dragging me to every set he wanted except for ONE which was a set he wanted to see anyway. Regardless, I had to leave again and try to find the restroom. I eventually did then found my way back. He’s gone even after saying he wasn’t leaving. I can’t get in touch with him he has no reception or data at this place. He’d been asking me to hotspot so he could’ve asked somebody else but he didn’t. I tried to contact the rest of the group in our rv but no one gets back to me for several hours. I couldn’t enjoy the music at this point because I’m having a panic attack in a sea of people I don’t want to be around, completely sober at this point, lost the one person I care about in a way where I know he will blame me, and can’t get ahold of anybody. I basically power walked around by myself for 3-4ish hours just to keep myself occupied and then eventually was able to meet up with some other people from our group. S is with them. I was so hurt. I know none of them understood what I was going though but they convinced me to come and left me alone and didn’t even care. I felt used by S too. I felt like his whole goal was just to get me here to sleep with me and he didn’t care about the rest or treating me decent, especially because our friendship leading up to this point had been so rocky and he completely just started tuning me out. Lots of mixed signals and lies to be honest, while also accusing me of lying when I wouldn’t be and saying he doesn’t trust me. I have so many things running through my head. Unfortunately two of our group separate to go meet up with some other people they met earlier that night and leave S and I alone again. I don’t know where I’m going or what to do again. S asks me if I’m going back to the rv and I stupidly just don’t respond. I found that he stonewalls me so much, sometimes for hours or days that I started doing it back here and there and it never goes well. If I don’t respond to him he obviously just gets pissed and walks off. I realize I don’t want to be left alone again and try to follow after him but he’s super tall and I have a really hard time keeping up plus I think he’s intentionally trying to lose me because he starts weaving in between rvs and I think hid behind one for a moment. I saw him come back out and look around but must not have seen me. So I got lost once when he did that but then found him again but then got lost a second time because I just couldn’t keep up. Anyway I make it back to the rv and he’s not there, no one is and it’s locked but I have one of the two keys. I probably should have unlocked it? But being in high anxiety mode I think I was more worried about leaving all our valuables unattended especially when one of the previous nights somebody was trying to get into our rv multiple times even with it locked. So I left it locked and walked towards the camp bathrooms to see if S was there. Not sure why I was looking for S, I guess I just didn’t want to be alone. Didn’t find him there so walk back to the rv again and find 3 of our group had just walked up so I unlock it and we go in. 2 others go shower and S gathers his things to shower and walks out. While he’s gone I go to grab his dab vape from his bag because I knew exactly where it was and I thought it would calm me down because I don’t need much. I grab the whole vape because I wanted to sit on my own bed and hit it. Anyway apparently he wasn’t going to shower and he returned while I had it and was looking for it and asked me where it was. Again, stupidly I don’t answer or at least not how he wanted. I answer his question with another question, “why?” Just being difficult. Honestly I recognize how toxic this is on its own in hindsight but at the time I think in my head I was just thinking about all the times he would ignore me for hours or days and I wasn’t able to ask a simple question or get a simple answer so I thought this was somehow justified based on those previous interactions which is ridiculous. In any case this goes over VERY badly. When some of our other group comes back he goes to one of them and tells them I went through his bags, implying all of them, and stole (yes, called me a thief) his entire vape. Not just a hit. Which by the way I was never even able to get hit off the vape because for some reason either I was doing something wrong or it wasn’t working/was dead/empty. I saw S hitting it later so no idea what I was doing wrong but I’d used it earlier and it wasn’t like it was complicated. Anyway not only that S who also always had a way of making an argument out of nothing also started accusing me of lying about walking back to the rv and seeing him there the first time I got back and just not unlocking the rv for him. Maybe he was hiding around the side of it? But I truly didn’t see him. He just starts calling me a thief and a liar on these grounds in front of or to, since he’s not really talking to me, our mutual friends. Somewhere in all of this I think I had said some pretty terrible things to him like having wished I never met him, nobody would ever want to be with him (he is not affectionate or caring but it’s not my place to say something like that so while I may feel like there’s some valid reasoning for it it’s obviously not okay), and some other things I regret. We also had another part of vacation planned just the two of us after the festival where we were to split off from the rest of the group and at some point I told him I felt like he completely tricked me into coming without caring about me at all and that I no longer wanted to go the rest of the trip with him or would pay him for our room we stayed together in previously because I may need that money to book something else. Which that part was just stingy. My portion of the room was $110. I think I was just thinking of how I spent $2500 (minimum, closer to $3,500 at this point) to go on a vacation where I had a massive extended panic attack the whole time, got abandoned, and didn’t get to enjoy much of what I wanted while he got everything he wanted. We barely talked the next day. We were supposed to leave the following morning (2 days after the horrible last day of the festival) to continue our vacation. Our more financially blessed friend got a hotel for everyone that hadn’t left yet so we could relax before the rest of us head home or elsewhere. While everyone else goes to the pool and to check out the casino I tried to talk to S about what was going on. Said I would pay but I need to know he isn’t lying about plans. He’d gone back and forth on a couple things and I felt like I might not have a place to stay at one of our next locations since it was with one of his friends, not a hotel. He refused to answer any questions, per usual. Even just me asking, “will I have a place to stay?” At this point he wanted me to pay him for the hotel we stayed at previously and for all of our other accommodations upfront but would not tell me if I was actually going to have somewhere to stay the entire time or would need to get another hotel on my own. I’m in panic mode, with everything going on and even simple things being hard for me I needed to know this but he wouldn’t tell me. The only thing he would say about every five minutes was, “pay me or leave me alone,” and he’d slip in, “thief,” here and there. This goes on for two hours. At one point I notice he’s recording me as I’m telling him I can’t pay him for everything if I don’t know that I’m going to have somewhere to stay. He could cancel plans and completely screw me over. This is important because he does in fact, cancel plans. But at the time he won’t say anything but to pay him. Eventually one of our group members come back and reluctantly gets involved and obviously tells me that I should pay for the room we stayed in which I do agree (even though I should’ve mentioned I paid for all our expensive meals while we were there) and that S should apologize which is what I was asking of him so that I could take it as the smallest sign he could be trusted not to screw me over, I’d pay him, and we could get on with everything. I ask for S’ PayPal and even though he recorded himself telling me to pay him and what seemed like me saying I wouldn’t (without knowing I’d have somewhere to say) it was odd because he was trying to refuse to give it to me, asking, “why?” I said, “why do you think I’m asking for your PayPal? You wanted me to pay you.” And then then he’d say he didn’t trust me with it. We still weren’t sure if we were going to continue with the trip and he asked me to leave the room so he could talk to our other friend. I knew he was going to show him the video/recording. I went to the other hotel room and unfortunately fell asleep. Our plane was supposed to be leaving in <6 hours so this was all incredibly rushed timing. I wake up and he had sent me a text message asking what room I’m in so we can talk. I reply I’m tired and just go to their room instead. By then everyone is back so we talk in the hallway. He says meet him at 6:30 am in the hall and be ready to go. He finally sends me the email associated with his PayPal and I send a test amount to make sure it goes to the right place. It shows his full name and doesn’t say anything about the email being unconfirmed. Back in my room I fall asleep on accident again and wake up to a message from him saying he didn’t receive anything and not to send anything else, and another message saying he doesn’t trust me and he’s sorry but he’s cancelling his flights and the accommodations. I catch him leaving at 6:30 on his own. I was crying and tried to talk to him but he just looked at me with a blank face and told me it’s my fault. We haven’t spoken since and it’s been about a week. It’s worth mentioning in our friendship leading up to this that he would often start problems when there were none just to say he had a reason to not want to talk to me and would ignore me for days at a time which is part of why I didn’t want to go on the vacation to begin with on top of me severe issues with everything else. I know that my anxieties and the hurtful things I said were or should have been in my control and I feel terrible about that but I can’t help but think he had this planned. Especially with recording him telling me to pay him then refusing to give me his PayPal. In fact for days after I messaged him to get his PayPal with no response, tried contacting his friend he was with to ask for it as well or to see if I could send the money to them and they could send it to S but they just said they’d pass the message on and never got back to me. I know he showed that video to people and tried to say I wouldn’t pay him and then refused to allow me to pay him to make me look bad and I don’t understand that. In the end he had to pay our friend (who initially covered the rv) his portion for the rv, so I had that friend forward my money to S on PayPal since he had him in his contacts after that. I even overpaid S, almost double to help with the ubers and for a vape since he may or may not think I tried to steal his. I guess now I’m just left with trying to process everything. Are we at equal fault? Is it more one person than the other? Is it forgivable? I have a hard time with boundaries and I don’t make lots of friends so this person means a lot to me. I’m worried about potentially getting sucked back into something that’s bad for me but also not caring about myself enough to stop it, I guess. For added context S and I quit talking once before and he even told me that we, “were never even really friends,” even though we’d spend 13 hours together a day just talking or playing games. It makes it hard to rationalize what’s real or what’s not. I think I need therapy. Does anyone have anything to offer here?

Hi. I’ve read lots of posts here and hoping some of you wise people might have advice for me.
I’ve been playing since January, 4-5 times a week. Skill level currently around 2.5-3.0. I’ve been playing with an Onix Z5 paddle, which has been fine, until someone pointed out that I’m probably ready for a different paddle - one with less pop and more control. So I started demoing paddles from our local store. Now that I’ve tested some other paddles, I don’t like the Onix as much, and agree it has too much pop (and noise!) for where I’m at in my game and what I’d like to improve (control/accuracy).
Of the paddles I’ve tried, I keep coming back to the Joola Hyperion 14mm swift, but not sure if I’m being influenced subconsciously by the hype and glowing reviews (which are mostly of the 16mm non swift model). In my limited experience, I think the Paddletech Tempest Wave Pro feels a bit similar to the Hyperion (with perhaps a bit less “power”), and if cost were a concern, I might go for that one. I am also planning try out the Diadem Icon V2 (and perhaps the V1 as well).
Other paddles I’ve tried include: Selkirk Epic Amped, Diadem Warrior Edge, Selkirk Invikta or Epic (don’t recall which one), and perhaps one more that I don’t recall.
Conclusions I’ve come to thus far are: 1) I prefer 14mm over 16 mm at this point in my game 2) Not sure about handle length. I do not use a 2 handed backhand although do sometimes place my 2nd hand over the other for stability (rather than power) on some shots, so would seem I don’t really need the longer handle (wasn’t an issue with the Onix) other than for the extra reach it would provide on some shots. 3) Total weight matters, and I should try to stay at or under 8oz. I don’t know enough to have an opinion on weight distribution although I’ve read that head heavy paddles cause some people some issues.
Complication … since trying these paddles over the past few weeks, I’ve developed a pain in my forearm. Not the elbow location of tennis elbow, but the top of my forearm near the elbow. I’ve read some things that this could be caused by overuse (I have probably increased my playtime over the past few weeks, but many people play more than I do), vibration in the paddle (possibly from the longer handle of the Hyperion?), wrong grip size, form, etc. I’d like to be done with this paddle purchase but don’t want to buy the Hyperion if it’s actually contributing to the arm pain.
Question: do you think the longer handle of the Hyperion could be causing the arm pain, and thus I should look for a paddle with a shorter handle? Or is it more likely just overuse and weak muscles that need to be developed, and nothing to do with paddle choice? Any other thoughts on the arm pain (cause or treatment) or paddles to try (or comments on the ones I’m leaning to). In case it matters, I am a woman in my 50’s, fairly fit and athletic, although no tennis background.
Thanks in advance for your input.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

I came across a post today that said:

Grateful for my friends who fought for my freedom. Happy Memorial Day. Thank you:

And then a list of their friends who have been in the military.
It is my belief that no military member in decades has been "fighting for our freedom", because our freedom has not been challenged.
The last time a foreign military made an attack upon US soil was in 1942, when a Japanese submarine took some shots at Santa Barbara, California. There were no deaths and the shots caused only minor damage to some buildings, so even that I think is a stretch to call a challenge to our freedom.
My understanding of modern US military strategy is that it is motivated primarily around securing access to oil and ensuring that the Middle East continues to export that oil to the US. That's economic strongarming though, not protection of freedom.
I believe that the largest challenges to our freedom come from within. Bans on drag shows, abortions, books, and other forms of personal choices are restricting our freedom to do these things. But the military is doing nothing to protect our freedom from these kinds of attacks.
I'm coming to CMV now, because the attitude and phrasing of "fighting for our freedom" is so pervasive, especially around Memorial Day, and I feel like I'm missing some key component of the situation that would explain how the military fights for freedom. I don't claim to be the most informed person in the world, so I would very much appreciate learning more about how the US uses its military and why this should be treated as a fight to maintain freedom. Note that a passive show of force, that maintaining a big military acts as a deterrent so that nobody attacks us in the first place will not be a sufficient answer for me, because this is an unverifiable claim - adversaries could very well have chosen not to attack even with a smaller military and then we're getting into hypotheticals rather than established fact.
So, CMV?

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

I haven't bought bagels at walmart in a while, but I don't remember them being unsliced. I guess I'll set walmart bagels next to kroger plastic grocery bags in my "don't bother" mental compartment. Interestingly, the kroger grocery bag issue getting to that compartment led me to going to other stores entirely because in my maga-ish town, it's weirder to use canvas bags at the kroger than at the other stores LOL.
These "minute" cost-saving measures these companies use have such frustrating consequences, and the cumulative frustrations and stress for the people who have more of these "slips" in their lives makes me rage.
Especially when they're well outside of the norm for the product, and so of course my adhd ass is NOT gonna notice the slight variance from the norm, until I'm hungry and waiting for my bagel to thaw enough that I can slice through the MFer.
Any other recent fun product "developments" anyone has noticed that have bitten anyone in the butt?

Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
https://preview.redd.it/1irxm74xty2b1.jpg?width=2409&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00a98cf83d0a5ae887b9d1e9f0238008682e3d91
"Inside the Unholy Womb" music track
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

I went to one of my local stores yesterday, the larger one of the 4 that surround me, and it.. It was really gross. It looked like an old navy store after a 50% off sale. Every section had wrong items mixed in with whatever was already there, the shorts area had every style and color of short on every display, the wall of leggings was in complete disarray, clothing was on the floor, the sale rack had size organizers but the sizes were to be found everywhere, etc.
Oh, and there were SOOOOOOOOOOO many black EBBs and backpacks (also a hot mess) on the walls and near checkout where it legit looked like some mass production clearout store. I get they were busy this weekend, however I went yesterday morning shortly after opening so it was left this way from the day before, also it has been pretty damn bad other times I've gone in too (yesterday just seemed the worst). I couldn't actually find anything I wanted because it was impossible to look around. It kinda made me sad, knowing that lulu is pretty pricey and used to be more exclusive, now it just felt really unfortunate lol.

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The group of Administrators - former Administrators? No, I'll still need Administrators. These though? Maybe? - leads us through the promenade of the Starbase, past the gawking crowds. Now that they're pretty sure I'm not going to start a riot or a war, I have a lot more curious onlookers following a... respectful distance behind. We continue on through the promenade towards a...
group of shops?
They're small, ramshackle shops, selling hot food and other small trinkets. If tourists came to this Starbase, I'd call it a tourist trap but I have a feeling that many locals rely on places like this for their daily meals no matter how much the Aviens and Mariens say there is plenty of food.
We stand in front of a shop where one of the Insect people is frying something in a large, shallow pan with a flame under it. Oh!
"Rapid River Roaring, what is the name of this species of sapient?" I ask.
"They are known to us as Azurians."
I look at the Azurian. They are making small efficient movements, transferring food to the large fryer, turning them quickly, and then another moves the cooked food to a rack to dry.
"Good day, may I have one of those?" I ask gently.
"2 Skys, exact change." They say without looking up. I make a show of patting my pockets dramatically, and then look at The Smell Of the Ocean and raise an eyebrow.
"You stand in the presence of a Builder! Know your place!" He barks at the Azurian at the fryer.
The Azurian lazily looks up at them, then over at me with my royal blue outfit and crown and wings, and then back to The Small Of the Ocean and says "1 Sky then. Discount."
I tip my head back and laugh. Really, I love these Azurians. I need to make sure they're taken care of. They don't care a single bit about who I am. I look again at Ocean and say "Well? Pay them please. I would like to try what they're cooking."
Ocean looks at me with a shocked expression. I'm sure they had not planned on this when their day started, but even for that they're still surprised.
You are not how they expect a Builder to be.
Good. Maybe they'll stop trying to treat me like they already know how I'm going to react.
Ocean takes out a small purse and digs around and takes out a small, green, metallic coin. They plunk it into the box next to the fryer, and the Azurian who was removing the cooked treats hands me one. It's hot and oily and crunchy and delightful.
"These are so good!" I say around a mouthfull of food. I swallow and look at the Azurians cooking. "Thank you so much, those are amazing." I turn to Ava, Mei and Fer'resi. "You need to try these. Ocean, buy three more!"
The Azurian looks up again. "2 Skys each since they're not Holy."
I look at Ocean again and raise an eyebrow. They dive into their purse and pull out six more coins. Three fried treats are produced, and everyone tries them.
Ava gobbles hers down. "Melody! You're right, these are amazing! We have to make sure we can get more from them. I wonder if they'll give us the recipe?"
"Probably, but I know we can't get the ingredients back home." I say with a smile.
"Well then, we'll just have to stay here. These are worth opening up a trade relationship with the folks at home. Mel, Fer'resi, what do you think?"
I look over and the food is gone. Both of them practically inhaled them. Mei'la is grinning "Melody they're amazing! They taste...familiar. Like a food we eat during one of the festivals."
Fer'resi nods. "It's very similar to the fried treats we eat during... The Ceasing." He thinks a moment.
"The Ceasing?" I ask.
"These days, it's a harvest holiday. When the work in the fields cease and we take a week or two before rotating to our next fields so as to not overwork the soil. It's a time to get together with family and have a party, visit with your neighbors, that kind of thing. There were records of the holiday being related to something else in the old religion, but most people figured it was always a harvest holiday, but now I wonder."
"What, like celebrating the closure of the Gate?" I ask.
"Yes, maybe it originally celebrated when the Builders ceased coming."
Fer'resi looks at his empty skewer thoughtfully. "Well, we can research the history of K'laxi religion later I suppose. And as delicious as these were, why are we here?"
Actually, he's right. I turn to Ocean. "Other than the snack break, why are we here, Ocean?"
With a sigh, he walks between the stands. We follow.
The people running the stands stare as we weave through them, but nobody stops us or even asks what we are doing. The benefits of being a Builder with the station Administrators I guess. We reach the wall behind the stands and The Smell of the Ocean looks at Rapid River Roaring. "It's around here, isn't it?"
Rapid River Roaring nods "Yes, but neither we or any of the Mariens could work out how to open it." They turn to look at me. "Empress, the entrance to the Throne is around here, but as we are not Builders...we don't know how to open the door."
I look out at the wall. It looks ancient. Like it's been here forever. Soot and dust cling to the walls. There has to be a switch or a lever or something right?
No. It's designed for a Builder to open.
Yes, but I've been a builder for what, two full days at this point and Empress for one? I don't know what I'm doing.
Think like an Empress. Think like a Builder.
Ugh, that doesn't help. Everything I've felt so far as shown me that they're self righeous, demanding people who just... get what they... want.
Is it really that easy?
I look up at the wall again. We seem to be in the middle as near as I can tell. Over on one side, it goes for 10 meters or so and then ends in a decoration that looks a little like a pillar. I turn and look at the other side and... yes, it's the same.
This isn't a wall, it's the door.
I look at the door now, and think about it. It looks like it would slide into the floor, or up into the ceiling. I bet it hasn't been opened in centuries. I don't want to hurt anyone who has set up shop here.
Think like a Builder, Melody. What do Builders do? They Build.
Okay okay. Let's think. If I have enough Nanites that I can make clothes for myself and my friends and I can make a frigging glowing crown and wings then there is probably enough to be able to...
I look at the wall and concentrate. Think like a Builder they say. Fine.
A breeze erupts from me and a light fog flows around my feet towards the wall. It clings to the wall until it covers an area that would be a comfortable doorway. A moment passes, and
"Hey, a door!" Ava says. "How did you do that?"
I turn back to her and wink. "I'm a Builder. I have no idea." Ava giggles.
Mei'la looks at the hole. "What happened to the matter in the wall? You can't just make it disappear.
Hmm, I look around, the walls didn't seem to get thicker, and I don't think I took the wall material and rebuilt it into more nanites, but the floor... sure is dusty.
"Look at the floor Mei'la, I think it's dust now."
Drifts of dust blew at our feet as she looked. I guess it was the same color of the wall. That must be it.
I walk over to my new opening and stand there. It smells of stale air and dust. There are no lights and no air movement.
"Come on everyone, let's walk purposefully into the dark and scary hole I made into the wall without really having a good understanding about what I'm doing or how I did it!" I call out to everyone as I go through the door.
The light from the market illuminates a small patch in front of me. It's just bare, dusty floor. I look up and see... nothing. Okay, okay, think like a Builder, act like I own the place.
Because - in a very real sense - you do.
Okay, first thing I want are lights. I think about how I'd want it to be lit, and concentrate and...
There is a loud, distant humming sound and with a dramatic flourish, lights come on in the room, just the color I was thinking.
Ava pushes her way in behind me and stops dead. "Melody... is that your Throne?"
It's breathtaking. About 100 meters from us, nearly 10 meters over our heads is what can really only be described as a Throne, A wide staircase leads up to it with platforms every 10 steps or so.
The Throne itself is... massive. It's a chair made of green shimmering metal. Towering and spindly, it reaches up behind where the Empress would sit, almost organically, towards the ceiling. Touching the ceiling it spreads and branches like the roots of a tree and disappears into the ceiling. I think it's connected. Maybe data connections? It is clearly meant to impress.
Doesn't look too comfortable to sit in though.
"I think it is, Ava. At least the Throne for this Starbase. The Nanites tell me every Starbase has one."
"Do they all look like this?" She looks around, eye wide.
"I don't know. I suppose in time, I'll go and find out."
Mei'la comes in and hearing that turns to me, "So, you're going to stay? Be their Empress? After how many millennia of them not having one you'll just... show up and say 'Hey, I'm in charge now' ?"
It is your right.
"I-I think that I can do some real good here" I say, weakly.
You don't need to justify it to them.
"How Melody? You're an Information Warfare Officer, you never even had a command."
You are a Builder.
"But, look at the people here, look at the Aviens and Mariens who are in charge hate each other! It won't be long before they start shooting each other!" I'm feeling panicked and I don't know why. Mei'la is right, what am I doing?
She is nothing. You are everything
Mei'la crosses her arms. "The only person who has said that they hate each other is you Melody. Nobody else on FarReach who has been to the station has seen it."
They can't see. They won't see.
I look out through the door to the promenade. "The people that live here sure don't look like they're living a free and easy life. We met a slave! Those food vendors we bought treats from sure don't look rich to me. If you look around it looks like... poverty. Like people barely hanging on. I can fix that."
Mei'la keeps staring at me. "How Melody? How will you fix it? You don't know the first thing about how to rule."
I whirl around "Do you? Please, enlighten me then." Wow, I almost used the Voice. I have to be more careful. That was close.
I throw up my hands. "So, what do you expect me to do then, just... go home? With all this that's happened to me, with all that's been given to me, to just waste it on tricks and being able to watch movies without the subtitles? Dr. Irenimum says the Nanites can't be turned off. So now I live for who knows how long with the full package giving me the ability, the knowledge and the power to rule and... I don't?"
Mei'la looks at me, eyes wide. "Melody, what are you saying?"
Ava stands next to me and puts a hand on my shoulder. "She's saying she's an Empress now, and she intends to rule."
I nod without thinking. Ava gets it. Ava gets me. No, wait. What's going on, what am I doing? Ugh, I need a minute to think, my head hurts.
Mei'la turns away and looks over at Fer'resi. "Fer'resi, you talk some sense into her. She isn't interested in listening to me."
Hey, wait a minute, that's not fair
"Hey Mei'la, that doesn't seem fair. I've got... a lot of stuff that I've just been introduced to. I need time to... process it."
"Fine then, let's head back to FarReach, we can process it while we go to the next system." She turns to leave.
Ņ̶̛̞̬̲̪̲̝͑́͆̈́͌̈́̊͝ͅȍ̸̡̞̫̖͕͈̮͌̍̆́͌͗͛͛͒̌͘!̶̢̛̫̦̺̣͍͕͇̳̟̂̊̓̀̕͜͝
She stops without thinking. She turns and looks at me, fearful.
I clap a hand over my mouth. Uh oh.
"Sorry! Sorry! What I mean is... No. I'm going to stay here and think things through. You can head back to FarReach if you want." I look at everyone "You can all leave, you're free to go anytime, But I'm going to keep going and see what's here for me. I need to do this."
The moment I say they're free to go, the Aviens and Mariens with me bolt. They run away as fast as they can. Ugh, good Empresses don't have their subjects run from them in terror, do they?
No, **Great **Empresses do.
Mei'la looks at me sadly. "Goodbye, Melody." and turns to leave. Fer'resi looks at her, then back at me, then at her. "I-I'm sorry Melody." He stammers "I-I-I need to get back to FarReach and... learn more about these translators you got us. Thank you for them, and for showing us how to wear them." Looking back one more time he leaves.
Ava smoothly transitions her hand on my shoulder into a hug. "You aren't getting rid of me that easily. I'm here to see this through. This is too cool just to give it all up and go back to FarReach and continue on like nothing's wrong." I lean into the hug. Ava knows what I need right now.
She's right. See it through.
Fine. If I'm the Empress, then I'll be the Empress. With newfound determinization, I walk up the stairs. I approach the throne and look at it.
There's no dust.
It's completely clean, how did they manage that trick? I'll have to ask the Nanites later. I turn and plant my rear end into the Throne.
I lean back in shock and gasp.
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a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

I was the first person from my family to go to university and, as I packed up my car and got ready to leave home, I felt proud and excited.
There was sadness as well. I would miss my parents and still wondered what might have been if Mary-Beth and I had stayed together.
She was my first love and it still hurt that we’d broken up. Even as I started the car and turned to give my parents a goodbye wave, it was her I was thinking of.
I focused on the road ahead. I would see my parents again when I came back for a visit at the end of term. And no doubt I’d see Mary-Beth around town then as well.
Though hopefully not with Todd, her new boyfriend.
It was warm, clear day in early September as my hometown slipped away behind me, and I was soon on the interstate with the radio on. I’d meet plenty of girls at university, I told myself, and turned the music up.
The campus I would be studying at was on a city centre site and I had found accommodation in a student residence close by. After a long day’s drive, I reached my destination, parked up and climbed out of my car.
My back was aching and my neck was stiff from all the hours behind the wheel but, as I stood on the sidewalk and took a first look at my new neighbourhood, I soon forgot about my discomfort.
There was a myriad of stores that seemed to sell everything under the sun. And I could see at least half a dozen bars and restaurants within a few minutes’ walk. I was not old enough to go in the bars and from the looks of the restaurants I doubted I would be able to afford to eat in them. But that wasn’t the point.
They were pulsing with life, the whole street was, and it was infectious.
Then a police car sped past, its siren blaring. I was in such a good mood this felt exciting rather than worrying. In my small hometown the sound of a police siren after dark would have set off a chorus of barking dogs and twitching curtains. Here, I seemed to be only person who was paying any notice to it.
Even the busker across the road had not missed a note in his enthusiastic rendition of an 80s classic as the police car passed. It had charted when I had still been a glint in my parents’ eyes, but it was one of those songs that endured.
The busker hit an especially high note and coins clinked into his open guitar case from people walking by.
Someone was filming the busker as well. A young woman, maybe a couple of years older than me. Her long dark hair hung almost to her waist, and I only realized I was staring when she finished filming, turned round and glanced at me.
I felt my cheeks colouring, looked down at my feet and sensed rather than saw her walking towards me.
“Hey newbie,” she said brightly.
I looked up.
She was very pretty, and she was smiling at me, so I needed to say something dazzling and funny and cool.
I failed.
Instead, I said, “Hey. Err… How do you know I’m new?”
She turned to my car and replied, “From the number of things packed into your car that were clearly put there by parents. Top tip: it’s not worth the effort of carrying most of those things up to your room.”
I grinned. I knew exactly what she meant. I had boxes of groceries that I could have bought when I arrived, but my mom had insisted I bring them just in case.
She had not specified ‘in case’ of what. Possibly a zombie apocalypse that left the city stores all out of canned soup and toilet rolls
I grinned sheepishly and replied, “It won’t be too bad. I can use the elevator.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “The elevator. That hasn’t worked since I moved in.”
I knew that my room was on the eighteenth floor and the prospect of having to get everything up that many stairs was stressful but, on the plus side, this gorgeous young woman was going to be one of my neighbours, so life was not all bad, I figured.
Especially if I could get to know her better.
“Uh,” I said. “In that case, maybe you could give me a hand carrying my stuff up. We could maybe go out afterwards and I could buy you a coffee as a thank you. Or a pizza,” I added hastily, thinking how weak a coffee sounded the moment the words were out of my mouth.
She laughed again. “Good try,” she said. “See you around. Maybe.”
With that she was gone, letting herself into the student apartment block with a swipe card.
I stood there still smiling for a minute then took a deep breath and started unloading my car.
What felt like an absolute age later, I collapsed onto the bed in my new room surrounded by boxes. I was exhausted and, as my eyes closed, I thought how all I wanted to do was sleep.
Which was the moment the music started up.
It sounded like it was coming from the room directly below mine. A bass beat that felt like it was making my entire room shake.
I lay there with my eyes open, now wide open.
All my neighbours were students, so it was no surprise really that there was music blaring out.
I checked the time on my phone. It was ten pm. So, late for sharing your tunes at volume but not completely unreasonable, I decided.
I sighed and rolled off the bed and decided to unpack. Hopefully soon, the music would quit, and I could get to sleep.
Four hours later, just after two am, the music finally stopped. I was so relieved and lay back down on the bed. The quiet was bliss.
Ten minutes later I heard a door slamming and voices in the room next door. Then a new sound system started up. I pulled a pillow around my head and wished the world would just go away.
At some point, the party next door must have ended, or I was so tired I fell asleep anyway despite the music. When I woke, I felt bleary and was not sure where I was. I blinked and looked around at the half-unpacked boxes and the strange room and remembered.
I rolled off the bed and went to get breakfast.
There were plenty of places to eat with prices that would not break the bank scattered among the more upmarket joints that offered artisan bread and organic everything.
After bacon, grits and a stack of pancakes drowned in syrup, I started to feel human again despite my sleep deprivation, and opened up my laptop.
Classes started in a couple of days and I had a reading list I had barely started, but I had a more pressing concern.
I needed to find a job to make ends meet. The weekdays would have to be set aside for my studies, but that left nights and weekends for earning money.
I had already emailed my resume to hundreds of organizations based in the city but had either heard nothing back or received a standard anonymous response. I checked again and there was still no positive news in my inbox.
Well, I wasn’t going to give up. I couldn’t afford to!
And, now I was here in the city, I could take a more direct approach by calling in person into offices and shops and bars and asking to speak to a manager.
I set off full of hope but, after hours of trying, I had achieved nothing. I was left thoroughly deflated. It had been humiliating.
With the sun starting to set in the sky, I slumped down onto a bench tried to think of alternative ways to earn money. Perhaps I could volunteer for medical experiments and risk developing mutant powers? Or perhaps sell an organ? There must have been something I did not need.
I was wondering if leaving home had been a mistake when I noticed a sign in the window of the building opposite.
The building at first glance looked derelict and the sign was just about visible under smeared-on dirt. It read Delivery Drivers Wanted and was handwritten.
It was massively uninspiring – but I was desperate.
I got to my feet and went to look for an entrance to the building.
I found a door round the back in an alley, and broken glass crunched under my feet as I walked up to it. I pressed the intercom and, when there was no answer at first, I spoke into it: “Hello. I saw your sign.”
There was a crackling sound then the door buzzed open.
Here goes nothing, I thought, and went in.
I found myself in a shabby reception area. An air conditioner rattled, and flies circled a dusty light bulb that hung from the ceiling. There was a desk in the centre of the room with no one sitting at it and an open hatch in the wall behind it. Next to the hatch there was another door. One, presumably, that would take you into the rest of the building.
I noticed as well that there was a strange smell in the room – a rank odour that made me want to put my hand over my nose and mouth.
I was wondering what it was, when the door in front of me opened and a man walked in.
He brought a wave of the fetid smell in with him.
From his odour and the way he looked, I don’t think he must have washed or changed his clothes for months, maybe years. His hair was greased into a side parting and his fingernails were caked with dirt.
Worse was to come. “You here about the delivery driver job?” he asked, and his breath carried across the room and hit me in the face.
I should have said, It’s all a mistake. Then I could have got out of there and back into the relatively fresh air of the city. Car fumes would have never smelt so good.
But I said, “Yes.”
“Do you have your own vehicle?” he asked.
“Yes,” I managed to answer while trying not to gag.
“Good,” he said. “When can you start?”
Through the mental haze caused by the assault on my senses, I wondered if that was it? What about my resume? What about references? Did he need to see my insurance and license?
Feeling flustered, I asked, “Do you mean, I’ve got the job?”
“Yep,” he replied. “After you make each delivery, come back to the depot and I will pay you cash in hand. I’ll go get your first package now.”
With that he went back through the door. His smell lingered.
A couple of minutes later, a small brown cardboard box with an address handwritten on it appeared in the hatch.
The man peered through after it. “I got just one rule,” he said. “Do not ever look inside the package. You got that?”
I gulped and nodded and picked up the box.
Back outside, I took a moment to try and regain my composure.
I was both grossed-out and delighted.
Grossed-out because that dude had some serious personal hygiene issues, and delighted because I had found a job and one for which I would be paid in cash as soon as I delivered the package I was holding.
Time to get busy, I told myself and hurried over to my car. I put the package on the passenger seat and set off.
My maps app directed me to an area of old one- and two-story houses tucked away behind high rise offices. They appeared to be abandoned. There were piles of rubble as well in places, that made me think the houses here were in the process of being demolished. That seemed inevitable. Once they were cleared, this would be a prime location for new residential developments.
Until then, it was Gloomville, and I spent a while driving up and down the old streets, trying to read house numbers.
Finally, I found the house I was looking for and parked up outside it. The paint on the wooden boards of the house’s façade was peeling away and all the windows were boarded up. But the number next to the porch matched the one on the package.
Telling myself this must be the right place. I picked up the package from the passenger seat.
It felt sticky underneath.
I lifted it up and looked at the base. A dark stain had spread out over the cardboard. Something inside had leaked.
And, much worse, whatever it was, had leaked all over my car seat.
I cursed. Hoping I wouldn’t have to spend my fee for the delivery on getting my car cleaned, I climbed out of the car and carried the package up to the house.
It was only when I was at the front door that I noticed the package was still leaking.
A blob of dark liquid dropped from the base and landed on the ground next to my feet.
It wasn’t just leaking, it was dripping. I looked back along the sidewalk. I had left a trail of dark droplets between my car and the house.
My first delivery was going downhill and fast. I wanted to hand over the package and get out of there before things could get any worse.
Only, if I rang the bell and handed over the package, the person I gave it to would realize straight away it was damaged.
They’d refuse delivery. Would start demanding compensation. And I wouldn’t get paid.
I couldn’t let the scenario that had played out in my head happen, so I put the package down, then rang the bell, and made a hasty exit.
It was a lousy plan B, but it was all I could think of.
I was almost back at my car when I heard the door open. I crouched down and looked back.
The door hung half-open. There was no light showing from inside and, at first, no sign of anyone there.
Then a hand reached out. Its fingers were long and bony and its fingernails were overgrown and twisted.
These curled, almost claw-like things, scraped over the package and then began to draw it in, into the house and the waiting darkness.
The door closed. I was left crouching there, wiping away a bead of cold sweat which had trickled down my face.
I opened the car door, got in, started the engine and drove away. It had been a very unsettling experience.
By the time I got back to the depot, I was almost feeling better.
When the man who had hired me handed over my payment, I felt a lot better.
“That’s great,” I told him, putting the bills in my pocket.
“Whatever,” he growled. “Be back here tomorrow night. And don’t be late.”
I smiled and headed off.
Back at my student accommodation, I traipsed up the stairs. This time I did not even make it through my front door before I heard the loud musing blaring out. It seemed to be coming from at least three directions.
Resigning myself to the fact that every night was party night where I now lived, I let myself into my room and lay on the bed.
I got no sleep this time and, when I saw the sky lightning with the approaching dawn, I got up and went out to see if I could clean the stain off my car seat myself.
As a street cleaner rattled past in their truck, I popped the lock and leaned in.
In the growing light of the new day, I could now see that the stain was dark red, and I had an awful feeling I knew what it was.
I’d only ever seen this much blood on crime shows on tv, but there it was, soaked into the fabric of the seat.
My shoulders slumped. No amount of scrubbing with a wet cloth and soap suds would get it out.
I got my phone out and was searching online to try and find out how much it would cost me to get the seat cleaned professionally, when I smelled a pleasant fragrance behind me.
I turned and saw the young woman from the evening before. Her long hair was elegantly plaited and she was wearing running gear. She also looked fresh and full of energy.
I rubbed my face. When I’d glimpsed in a mirror before coming outside, I’d seen the dark patches under my eyes. I was exhausted and looked it.
Yet, she had clearly had a good night’s sleep.
I was about to ask her how she did that – but she was peering over my shoulder at the passenger seat.
“Wow,” she said. “Did you murder your passenger last night?”
I was shocked at her accusation and said with a catch in my voice, “N… No.”
Then I saw the cheeky smile on her face.
“I’ve got a job as a delivery driver,” I told her, “And one of the packages leaked.”
“What was in the package?” she asked.
I really hadn’t considered that. I’d been too stressed at the time. I scratched my chin and said, “Raw meat, perhaps? Something rare that you can’t get in a regular store.”
“Could be,” she replied, then added, “Anyway, I need to get going. See you later.”
With that she jogged away.
I went back to looking for a solution to my ruined seat.
After thirty minutes clicking and scrolling, I did not find anything that I felt I could afford, so decided to leave it for a while.
I had a lot of other things I wanted to get done. I needed to arrange my student photo I.D., register with the university library, and spend some serious time on my reading list.
The day passed quickly, and I was feeling pleased with myself as I set off for the depot.
I’d put a towel over the seat so I would not have to look at it, and ‘out of sight out of mind’ was working for me as I pulled up outside the depot.
The miasma of stale armpits and worse met me as I was buzzed in. The man was on the other side of the hatch with a package ready for me. It was around the same size as the last one and looked sturdy enough – and dry.
I wanted to ask if it would stay that way, but to do so, I would risk altering him to what had really happened with my last delivery.
So, I grinned and said, “Great.” Then took the package out to my car.
When I saw that the address written on the package was for a regular apartment block in a good district, I felt reassured that this was going to be a breeze. The journey was easy, and I found a parking space on a well-lit street.
I checked all sides of the package and, relieved to see nothing had leaked out, I put it under my arm and went to find a soon to be satisfied customer’s front door.
There was no answer on the buzzer for the number on the address, so I tried a couple more until someone let me in. The interior of the building was clean and smelt of air freshener and the elevator was working.
I caught it up to the fifth floor, stepped out into a pleasant passageway, and found the apartment I was looking for.
I pressed the buzzer and knocked but there was no answer.
Not a problem, I thought, I’d just leave it outside the door.
I put it down and smiled – and the package moved. It rocked slightly from side to side.
I blinked and rubbed my eyes. I was tired and must have imagined that the package had moved. Surely?
It rocked again, faster this time, and I heard a dull thud come from inside.
I frowned. I wasn’t imagining this. There seemed to be something inside the package, and it was stirring.
A louder thud sounded, and the package jerked to one side. Whatever was in there was exerting some serious force.
The package rattled and shook. The thudding was constant now. And then the package broke open. It was a small split, just below where the address was written on.
I instinctively took a step backwards.
A second break appeared in the package, close to the first, and something emerged through it.
It was dark and sharp and was moving from side to side.
It looked like some kind of limb – and another one was beginning to break free from the first split.
And another – this one from a tear in the base of the package.
As I watched with a mounting sense of horror a dozen dark limbs appeared from inside the package.
Some probed and twitched into space. Others found the floor and, slowly, uncertainly, they began to crawl. Propelled by the legs of the things inside it, the package began to head towards me.
I tried to run away, but I was so freaked out I tripped myself up and ended up sprawled on the floor. I looked up and saw the hideously animated package was almost on me. One of its limbs was flickering against my sneaker.
I did not hear the elevator open, did not realize someone had stepped out from it, until I saw arms reaching down and lifting the package up.
The limbs went into a frenzy, but now they were clawing at nothing.
I looked up – into a face that was twisted with rage.
“What have you done?” the man standing over me demanded. “This rare specimen is to have pride of place in my collection. If you have hurt it, I will sue you!”
With that outburst, he stormed to his door with the package and hurried inside.
I was left still sitting on my backside. “How would you rate your delivery today on a scale of one to five?” I asked the empty passageway then began to laugh hysterically.
I gave it twenty minutes so I could calm down, before driving back to the depot to collect my money.
I found the man waiting once more behind the hatch with a new package.
I wasn’t sure my nerves were up to it and asked, “Do you have another driver who could take it?”
“You do the jobs I allocate to you, or you don’t get paid anything,” he told me with an ugly sneer on his face.
“Fine,” I said under my breath and took the package.
I did not need to look at the address to know where I was taking it because it started to leak blood before I had even got it into the car.
Muttering to myself, I put it on the towel on the passenger seat and set off.
I drove faster than I normally would and arrived at the house in good time. More of its neighbouring houses had been demolished and there was a digger parked up as well. The redevelopment of the area seemed to be picking up pace.
I picked up my own pace, hopped out of the car, and put package down outside the house. Then I pressed the bell and made myself scarce.
I was back in the car when the door opened. I peered over at the darkness revealed.
At the pale figure standing in its midst.
Its eyes were dark voids in its face, its nose was flattened, and its ears rose into sharp tips. It was holding the package in its grotesque grip.
Blood was dripping from the package and, as I watched, the creature’s tongue flickered out and licked the blood. It smiled, showing teeth that looked like shards of glass. Then it retreated back into the house, and the door closed.
I was left terrified. My hands were shaking so badly, it took me three goes to get the key in the ignition and, as I drove away I vowed never to return.
My very short career as a delivery driver was over. I just couldn’t take the weirdness.
When I arrived back at the depot, I did not tell the malodorous man about my decision. I took the money and ran.
Feeling relieved that I’d never have to see or smell him again, I arrived back at my student accommodation.
Even from the roadside, I could hear music blaring out from inside, so I decided to sleep in the car.
I closed my eyes and leant back.
I slept restlessly and when dawn finally arrived, I felt dreadful. I was sitting there, aching all over and feeling about ninety years old when someone tapped on my window.
It was the young woman. She looked more beautiful every time I saw her.
I wound the window down and smiled in what I hoped was an irresistibly handsome way.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you get locked out last night?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m finding it hard to sleep in my room because of all the noise.”
She laughed and said, “Do you want to come up to my room, I have something that will help.”
How could I say no!
Her room was chaotic, with clothes, books and pictures everywhere. She rooted around inside a pile of tops lying tangled on the floor and brought out a small plastic container.
“Try these,” she said. “They’re noise cancelling ear buds. I have the new model so you’re welcome to have these.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “Hopefully things will get better now.”
“You seem to be doing OK,” she replied. “I mean, you’ve got your job.”
I frowned and told her about the package that had sprouted legs and described the strange figure that I had seen when I dropped off the second bleeding package.
I expected her to be shocked, but she looked excited.
“Wow!” she exclaimed. “That sounds like a vampire, and I love vampires. You have to let me know next time you’re going to deliver to it.”
She gave me her phone number and made me promise to message her.
All thoughts of giving up the job as a delivery driver forgotten, I told her I would, and left her room with a big grin on my face.
That night I headed for the depot building hoping there would be another package dripping with blood waiting for me.
There wasn’t. The man, smelling as rank as ever, told me I had to collect the package from a different location tonight and I’d be given the delivery address for it when I did,
I had zero enthusiasm for this until he let me know where the collection was to be made.
As soon as I was outside, I sent a message:
Hey, I am heading to the vampire’s house now.
Moments after I pressed send, a reply came:
Take me with you!
Yes! I thought and we arranged a place for me to pick her up. Thirty minutes later I was driving through the night with a beautiful girl by my side.
She’d brought a cushion with her so she didn’t have to sit on the messed up cover of the passenger seat and her cheeks were flushed with excitement.
For my part, I had decided to ask her out on a date as soon as I could get the courage and I was desperately hoping she would say yes.
In the meantime, there was the small matter of a package to collect.
I pulled up in my usual place. More houses had been demolished and I guessed the house we were going to was due to be knocked down soon.
I wondered if, perhaps, the strange creature who lived there was moving out because of this.
I must admit, I did not truly believe it was a vampire. It was grade A freaky looking, but that did not automatically make it one of the undead.
Still, I was feeling very apprehensive now the moment to see it face to face again had arrived. I pressed the bell.
My gorgeous companion had refused to stay in the car and had come with me. She was so stoked she could not stand still as we waited for a response.
But there was nothing.
I was about to press the bell again, when she put her hand on my arm and said, “Wait.”
Then she pushed the door. It creaked and opened.
“Result,” she said brightly and stepped inside.
I took a deep breath and followed.
Bugs with far too many legs scurried out of our way as we walked along a dark hallway. There was a large room at the end of the hallway.
I would have been very happy to not go into it, but she was hurrying ahead. She made her way into the room, then came to a halt and gasped.
I walked up to her side and understood why.
The room was lit by a single candle in an ornate gold holder. Dark curtains hung over the windows, keeping the outside world away, and there were bones all over the floor.
I thought of the packages I had delivered and my theory that they had held raw meat.
It looked like I had been right and that this feast dripping with blood had been a regular delivery to the creature that lived here.
My companion took my arm and said, “Look.”
In an ante room, there was a coffin on a table. She walked over to it and looked at the lid. Then she turned round and her eyes were shining as she told me, “It’s got a note taped to it, saying it’s for collection. And there’s a delivery address as well.”
She clapped her hands together and added a delighted, “Amazing.”
I was still not happy about the whole business and said, “Ok, let’s get the coffin in the car then. The sooner we get it delivered the better.”
“After we look inside,” she said gleefully.
I remembered the disgusting guy at the depot’s rule about never looking inside a package, and said, “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She wrinkled her nose up in the cutest way and replied, “Spoilsport.”
But she didn’t ask again, and together we carried the coffin out to the car. It just about fit onto the back seats and I was relieved when we drove away from the house. Being reduced to rubble was the best thing that could happen to the place, in my opinion.
The delivery address was in a part of the city that neither of us had ever heard of and I got completely lost.
Between the stress of that, and the strange package, and still trying to get up the nerve to ask for a date, my guts started to churn and I had to stop off at a diner so I could use their rest room.
I was the only person in the place apart from a tired looking waitress. Once I’d visited the rest room, I bought a couple of coffees to go, even though caffeine was the last thing I needed, then returned to the car.
It was empty.
The passenger door was open and one of the back seats. As I came closer, I saw that the lid of the coffin was open as well.
I started to feel sick with worry. Had curiosity got the better of my companion, and she had looked inside the coffin?
I peered into the coffin through the car window. There was nothing in there either.
I swore out loud and began to look around frantically – and it was then I saw the body lying on the ground.
It was near a dark corner of the diner. I hurried over.
It was the young woman. I knelt down and touched her face. Two trails of blood ran from cuts on her neck.
She had been so full of life, so beautiful. Now, she was dead.
I began to cry.
She must have disturbed the vampire in its coffin, and it had lashed out. Had fed on her and stolen her life.
As I knelt there weeping, I suddenly became aware of movement nearby.
I turned, thinking it might be the waitress, and saw the vampire crouching in the shadows.
Its hideous, bat-like head was tilted to one side and its tongue flickered out. Its mouth hung slightly open and I could see dark red stains on its monster’s teeth.
“You did this,” I said as anger flared inside me. “You!” I screamed.
It looked at me, and it smiled, and then wings unfurled from its back, and it sped into the sky and away.
I was nothing to it. And the young woman it had killed was growing cold on the ground next to me.
I picked her body up and carried it over to the car. My mind was racing and I’m not sure why, but I put her in the empty coffin as gently as I could then closed the lid, and the car door. I think I did not want anyone to see her like that.
I went to sit in the driver’s seat.
I felt utterly lost and alone and more scared than I had ever been in my life.
With dawn still hours away, I desperately tried to think what I should do next.
I was still trying to think, when I heard the back door click open. I span round. Shock sent cold waves through my body. The lid of the coffin was once more loose and it was empty.
And there was someone standing outside the car. Her long dark hair hung down her back almost to her waist.
Feeling as if I was in a dream, I climbed out of the car. She turned to me and smiled. Her lips were pale. Her fangs razor sharp.
“Help me,” she said in a quiet voice. “I am thirsty. I need to feed.”
Since that night, I have stayed with her. I watch over her coffin while she sleeps during the day. After dusk, I drive her to places where she can hunt for new victims to sate her bloodlust.
I will do this as long as she needs me. Because she is my dark mistress. My savage, beautiful creature of the night.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

I did a weird thing where I started rewatching the show at S2 because I knew it'd changed. Then, after finishing S5 I went back and rewatched S1, b/c S6 feels like the end for me as we lose Molly Ephraim's Mandy. Rewatching S1 in the middle of the series made me see how much changed afterward. I'm so surprised at the changes that I didn't pick up on the first time I watched the show. S1 Mike was nowhere near as politically vocal or loud mouthed. S1 Kristin and Mandy were lovable and hilarious together. Kristin was somewhat of a goof like Mandy but they played off each other so well, esp. when you throw Kyle into the mix. S2 Kristin is all of a sudden more introverted but also an opinionated person, more bent on arguing with her family. Amanda Fuller's Kristen is so different as Alex Krosney. The writers changed the family dynamic a lot.
I think, had they kept the same actresses, same dynamic but still went with aging up Boyd and adding Ryan and making Eve more prominent it would've still been a successful show. It seems like while the later show was still good, it def. lost some steam in S2+. Now that I am back to watching S6, and I am disliking the changed characters. Mike and Kristin are kinda annoying. I can't ever see Amanda Fuller doing the "pie rack" video. At the same time, she does look more "motherly" as she is older and taller than Alex Krosney.

My son was complaining that we were out of Smoothie mix. My wife told him that both of our usual grocery stores were sold out. She then said she'd try Amazon.
I told her I didn't think we'd have to have it shipped all the way from the jungle.
I was laughing like Muttley and she told me to get out of her kitchen 😂